Louise de Vilmorin's Poetics: a Translation Challenge

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the poetic work of Louise de Vilmorin, a French writer of the 20th century, of renowned fame in Parisian literary circles and with an extensive publication and incursions in different literary genres, having written novels, novels, short stories, poems etc., whose work remains unpublished in Brazil today. Given the extent of his poetic production, which has nineteen works, the focus of the article was directed to her tenth book, L'Alphabet des aveux, published in 1954, by Gallimard, with illustrations by Jean Hugo. In this paper we will analyze the translation challenges involving the work L'Alphabet des aveux, characterized by a complex linguistic work, in which we identify the presence of palindromes, verses (h)olorimes, calligrams, rebus, among other reputable untranslatable procedures. For this purpose, works of a biographical nature will be used, such as Je suis née inconsolable: Louise de Vilmorin (2008), or Essai sur Louise de Vilmorin (1962), written by her brother, André de Vilmorin, to present the professional and personal trajectory of the writer. Furthermore, when it comes to the analysis of the work in question from a translation perspective, the texts by Haroldo de Campos on the Theory of Transcreation that appear in the book organized by Marcelo Tápia, entitled Transcreation (2013), the theoretical current chosen to reflect on the translational possibilities of his work will be used, since it allows thinking about the relationship between original and translation from a non-prescriptive perspective, in which the translator performs a function similar to the author with a view to paramorphic recreation, as well as the texts of the critic and translator Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme (1982) and Poétique du traduire (1999), in order to theoretically base the discussion on the melopeic elements that structure the poems of L'Alphabet des aveux and constitute a real translation challenge to those who wish to present such work to a new readership.